Patent Law for Computer Scientists Steps to Protect Computer-Impleme
Patent laws are different in many countries, and inventors are sometimes at a loss to understand which basic requirements should be satisfied if an invention is to be granted a patent. This is particularly true for inventions implemented on a comput
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Daniel Closa Alex Gardiner Falk Giemsa Jörg Machek
Patent Law for Computer Scientists Steps to Protect Computer-Implemented Inventions
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Patent Law for Computer Scientists
Daniel Closa Jo¨rg Machek
l
Alex Gardiner
l
Falk Giemsa
Patent Law for Computer Scientists Steps to Protect Computer-Implemented Inventions
Daniel Closa Alex Gardiner Falk Giemsa Jo¨rg Machek European Patent Office, Munich [email protected]
ACM Computing Classification (1998): K.5.1, K.4.1, J.1 ISBN: 978-3-642-05077-0 e-ISBN: 978-3-642-05078-7 DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-05078-7 Springer Heidelberg Dordrecht London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2009940399 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Violations are liable to prosecution under the German Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Cover design: KuenkelLopka GmbH, Heidelberg, Germany Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Preface
We work at the European Patent Office (EPO). Three of us are patent examiners and one is the director of a group of patent examiners. Patent examiners assess applications for patents which may be granted to inventors. A patent is a legal title giving its holder the right to prevent third parties from commercially using an invention without authorisation. Examiners check in particular that the invention is new and not some mere obvious alteration to something which already exists, by carrying out searches on all sorts of information which existed and could have been looked at by the applicant in the time up to the filing of their first application. Such information is collectively known as the “prior art” by those working in the patent world. Patent examiners work at the forefront of technology and deal every day with the latest and most challenging technical innovations. We will present an overview of the mindset of typical patent examiners. Although we aim to give general advice, a certain bias towards the procedures of the EPO is unavoidable. The idea underlying this book first came about when two of us participated in writing an article [1] in which we demonstrated, by way of one particular example, how much technical information had to be disclosed in an application in order to describe a technical contributi
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